Google Acquires Nik Software, The Company Behind The Popular Snapseed Photo Editing App For iOS

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Google has acquired Nik Software, the company behind Snapseed, the popular Instagram-like photo editing app for desktop and iOS. Besides Snapseed, though, the company also offers numerous other tools for amateur and professional photographers. The Nik Software team says that it has always “aspired to share [its] passion for photography with everyone” and that “with Google’s support [the Nik Software team] hopes to be able to help many millions more people create awesome pictures. Neither Nik Software nor Google have disclosed the financial terms of the transaction.

It’s not clear what Google’s plans for Snapseed and Nik Software’s other photography tools are, but the fact that Google’s Vic Gundotra announced the acquisition on Google+ makes it likely that the company plans to use at least some of the company’s technology for Google+ on mobile and/or desktop. Picasa, of course, is another area where Google could use some of Nik Software’s expertise.

Here is what Vic Gundotra had to say about the acquisition:

Today I’m excited to welcome +Nik Software to the Google family! We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone.

Snapseed is, at its core, very similar to Instagram and allows users to apply filters and perform other photo editing tasks on their mobile devices and on the desktop. Snapseed won Apple’s iPad App of the Year award in 2011 and the company says that the application has more than 9 million users. The Snapseed team was already working on an Android app, too, which probably made the company an even more attractive acquisition target for Google.

Nik Software was founded in 1995 and has offices in Hamburg, Germany, and San Diego. The company received a minority equity investment from Nikon Corporation Japan in 2005.

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OverviewGoogle is a multinational corporation that is specialized in internet-related services and products. The company’s product portfolio includes Google Search, which provides users with access to information online; Knowledge Graph that allows to search for things, people, or places as well as builds systems recognizing speech and understanding natural language; Google Now, which provides information …